Pain and Suffering

I have come to Las Vegas mostly to get away from a lot of mental/physical/emotional discomfort and pain in my "normal" life for a while. My general mental and physical health has been pretty good here, though today I had an occurrence of my "blocked intestine" situation (with no discernible specific cause or trigger) that was quite painful but which passed (no pun intended) within 20 minutes, as usual. These pain experiences cause a physical and mental state that borders on excruciating insanity, with an ebb and flow to this particular situation that gives me ample opportunity to try out all my tricks to calm myself in the face of the experience and expectations of the next peak of pain.
Not having really had to endure many painful circumstances in my life, I frequently wonder about just how my pain experiences compare to others, specifically when I'm trying to decide if my pain is something I should worry about, or if it is common to others. It sounds silly in some ways, but it is pretty critical to deciding things like "should I go to the hospital", or "should I take something for this", or "am I just being a wimp".
Pain itself is one of those grand unmeasurable items in our time. Doctors have to ask patients about pain, with no way of telling if they are responding with the truth, and only crude methods of comparing that pain with that of others.
While I consider pain to be a base physical response, I consider suffering to be something completely different. Suffering I think of as a completely mental response, and as such, it is something that is possible to affect and control, and even eliminate. Pain is one of many potential triggers and inputs to suffering, but suffering does not necessarily follow from pain. Pain, like emotions, is an inescapable part of being human, and as such, we cannot control or escape it. What we can control is our response to that.
Am I saying that we can control even our reflexes (such as to pull our hand back from a burning-hot contact)? No, but as soon as you get beyond reflexes and maybe some other hard-wired responses, I think we do have the potential for full control of all other responses. Saying this makes me wonder what other things besides reflexes come under the category of my "hard-wired" label. Blood-flow, heart-rate, and muscle-tension seem to come closer to reflexes, while tears and vocalizations are closer to the under-our-control side of things.
So, what good can all this pondering and distinction do for humanity? Well, for one thing, it would point to where any future "measure" of pain should be (measuring of the hard-wired responses). It can also help people to realize the things they shouldn't feel bad about not being able to control (and shouldn't waste time and effort trying to control). And, it can help people to take responsibility for the aspects they *do* control.
(Note that I know that many "controllable" responses are the result of long-standing habit, or "programming", but these responses are nonetheless controllable, even if the strength of the habit may make it *seem* like the behavior is hard-wired.)